At first, i thought that linking my Steam and GOG accounts might be a good idea.
But now i'm wondering if it is a form of data farming, so GOG can just keep a record of what everyone is buying on Steam.

The first batch of GOG connect games have vanished, and haven't been replaced with anything new for over a week, it's just an empty page... And there is no longer any mention (or any direct way to enter) the GOG connect page from the store page, unless i've been struck blind.

Anyone visiting the GOG website now would not even know that GOG connect existed.

Your thoughts?

Gog's terms of service doesn't say much about Gog Connect:

"13.3 A quick word about GOG Connect (which you can read more about here). This (optional) feature is provided subject to Valve’s Steam Web API Terms of Use and therefore access to this feature and how it works may change if necessary to reflect those Terms of Use. Please also see section [9.3] of our Privacy Policy, which explains how we use ‘Steam Data’ and contains important liability provisions regarding it. Please comply fully with those Terms of Use, since any breach of them could have negative consequences for this feature and will also be considered an irremediable material breach of this User Agreement. Please also see our GOG Connect FAQs which contain further information about GOG Connect and how to use it."

Anyway I don't see how much of anything useful that Gog can gleam from your account other than the contents of your library, which isn't terribly useful at the user level since Gog probably has good estimates of industry sales figures for individual games.

More than anything, Gog Connect feels like just another half-implemented feature, like the Movies section, the Redeem Your Code section and some Galaxy functionality. I wouldn't worry about it.

I think it was mostly a short lived PR event. A great event, but despite first appearances not really a "feature", considering that it's more like timed promos and restricted to selected games from willing publishers, rather than the promise to allow the import of already owned Steam games to GOG. They advertised it with something like "Why pay twice for games you already own?", but that's exactly what you'll have to do if you missed the promo. I'd compare it to Origin's "On The House", except you only get games for free that you already own elsewhere and that GOG gave them away all at once instead of one per month or so.

I for one don't like the idea of GOG knowing that I don't use Steam, and that is clearly what this whole "Connect" thing has been created for!

Next thing you know they are going to come up with some stupid ruse to learn my real name. WELL I SAY "Fuck You GOG! IT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN!"

Sincerely
Abe

I don't think it's as short-lived as people are saying. You know, there was some sort of sale here just recently...hmm, can't think of it, but it was pretty major and might be why GOG hasn't done anything with Connect recently.

I think if someone really thinks that that is what is happening then they should not use the feature, but I also think it is ridiculous. There are websites online that use the Steam API to access people's public profiles to harvest data and generate statistics already, and Steam also produces its own statistics. In order for any website to access someone's Steam game list etc. the person has to make their profile public first, and doing so means they authorize all Steam apps out there to look at their data, so it is entirely within a person's control of whether or not their data is visible to 3rd parties. A lot of people (myself included) do make their Steam profile public in order to be able to share their account info with friends or the general public on purpose because they're ok with that, or because there are benefits to doing so such as the ability to use Steamgifts.com and steamcompanion.com to get free games among many many other useful websites out there such as isthereanydeal.com and countless others.

As such, there are thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people out there who make their Steam profile's public and many utilities generate statistics from this which is useful to gamers such as ourselves, useful to game developers and to Valve, Steam and just about anyone in the gaming industry or who enjoys gaming. No personal information is present, just list of games, wishlist and whatever else one has made public.

There's no reason for some company to create an app with some evil alterior motive to trick people into allowing them to data harvest, because the useful data is already out there.

As for there not being any games on GOG Connect right now, everyone should expect that that is how it will normally be. Game companies deciding to allow GOG to give free copies of their games if someone owns them on Steam already is almost certainly not going to be a daily or even weekly event I highly doubt. It is an extreme rarity that companies are going to want to do that, but they occasionally do. Previously when they did this, it was quite hacky and inconvenient for people to be able to claim their games, such as the "RECLAIM GAMES" link on the redeem page, which required people to go into their Steam account and hunt down the CD key for the game or other gymnastics that many people couldn't even find if it was pointed out with a laser pointer to them. GOG Connect is an obvious attempt to solve that problem technologically to make it much easier to allow companies to give free copies of their games to people on GOG without them having to jump through a bunch of hoops not to mention increasing tech support queries on both ends.

GOG Connect isn't a promise to people that there will be a constant steady stream of games available, it is a mechanism that GOG can now use as a convenience to the user base for _if_ and _when_ game companies decide they want to allow their customers to transfer a copy of a game they own on Steam to GOG, not a guarantee that it will happen with any regularity or even at all.

IMHO, anyone expecting GOG Connect to constantly or regularly make games available from Steam ownership really doesn't understand the purpose of it. Perhaps GOG didn't make that purpose clear enough in their announcements, hard to say. I completely get what it's all about though and hopefully I was able to convey that to anyone who misunderstands GOG Connect. And if anyone thinks there is some evil corporate conspiracy theory to data mine them on Steam, there are no words that I, anyone else from the community, or anyone from GOG could ever say to change their minds about that because you can't prove nor disprove something like that. You always have the best answers. :)

It'd be like finding out how many people use Windows instead of Linux - no surprises there.

The reason they don't have any new games is because they don't have any new deals with publishers. These take months to do so don't expect to see anything regularly on that page.

With recently finished GOG sale and upcoming Steam sale I doubt there will be new games added to Connect in the nearest weeks/month. There will be later, I'm sure of it, but it won't be a massive catalog. There is no point for GOG and publishers in allowing people to have a free copy of the Steam-account game. Where's the profit in that? And really, people should be glad they have it at all.

Of course it is. All these types of things, clientwares included. This works for both steam and Gog, Gog get to know those who are willing to go a steam like route and steam get a good gauge of customers who may be buying here. Selling a product nowadays is totally irrelevant, its all abut the data capture and customer control.

I don't use Steam, so my life is simpler and happier .

Edit: Actually Trilarion's post just below is the TL;DR version of mine :-D

Actually I can see a reason, and that's collection of more disaggregated data. Specifically, data about GOG's user base, and subsets of that all the way down to individuals. Useful data is already out there, but there's much more useful data that you can collect through Connect.

Just off the top of my head, some examples that might be nonsense from a commercial point of view (that's why I'm not running a store :-D), but then again I think that the guys actually in charge of this would come up with really useful applications:

- Most obviously, what kind of games that we don't have in our catalog are our customers buying on Steam?
- How many users are buying games more than once, both on Steam and here? What games? How far apart in time? At what discounts?
- How many people are buying day one releases on Steam? What happens when we bring those games to GOG a few months or a year later? (How many times have you seen in the forum that "nice release but sorry, I just got it last month on Steam"?)
- How many people already own this particular game we're negotiating to add to our catalog? Are those the guys who buy games more than once?
- The ones who don't have it, do they wait for the first Steam sale? Do they wait for the first BIG sale? Can we still sell them the game before Steam? Should we hurry?
- Niche games. Look at that game we thought was too niche to be here. Lots of our users bought it on Steam. (Or the other way round. "See? I told you, no way this bunch of old guys was going to buy that" :-P)
- Also, imagine having access to 2 sets of wishlists instead of one. (Although I think wishlists are not provided by the Steam API, but you know, they have all our steam id's now.)
- And so on...

Go down to the individual level, and maybe you and me could be seeing different games in our recommendations based on whether we have (or not) a game on Steam and we could (or not) buy it again. Or a personalised email from time to time reminding us of a certain game we might be interested in although (or because) we have it on Steam... Or because it's in our Steam wishlist.

Now, I'm not in the tin foil hat crew. First, I don't know if GOG is actually aiming for this kind of information. Second, I don't care if they are. I'm actually ok with it, if it will improve their business and my GOG experience. But I wouldn't go as far as thinking that GOG can't have any interest in data-mining us through Connect.

Unless GOG limits itself in this regard, stating somewhere that they will not use or keep the information except for the specific purpose of ..., then you can safely assume that they have a nice statistcs of what games people have on Steam (and maybe how often they are played) by now. That's the way business works in a modern world. If you don't want that, don't do it.

And even if GOG would restrict itself, it's very tempting. I wouldn't really trust them in this regard. Stranger things have happened. Maybe the data is collected just by accident. Again, the only way to avoid this, is not taking part in it.

Thank you, for pointing out the privacy concern.
Yes and no. It's ultimately about selling a product. Apple wants you to buy its shiny I-phones and people do. If people wouldn't, Apple shares would plunge quicker than the speed of light.

Gathering as much data as possible is currently seen as the magic key to learn about your wildest desires (even those you don't know yourself) and in turn make more sellings. That's the goal. Maybe data science is a bit overrated in this regard.

Some companies, especially startups who produce nothing but losses, are currently given a lot of credit if they include some user data story. It may be a bit of a hype.

GOG sells things and is profitable. But of course they will feel a strong incentive to gather as much data as possible (as long as customers are following them) just in order to become more profitable.

Yes! And now gOg have this valuable information, they are going to use it to.... ummm..... Yes!

Well, yes and no. Google for instance doesn't actually sell anything, it is a vast advertising system. In that sense data is the commodity. Data science is really one of the big evils in the world, I mean you can't go into some shops now, facial recognition, card transactions, buying habbits databases etc. (and thats just going in a shop), by the time you leave the shop they will have a complete profile on you (well, not me so much as old), from facebook links, through advertising mass databases, customer profiles, credit agencies, probably most security forces. This is simply the world nowadays, I mean even this post has probably passed through multiple profilers before you read it.
So scam might be a harsh word for it, but it is nevertheless a tool in the ever increasing data market.
I would say steam get more from it. I can just see the theoretical conversation:
So this "amok" chap, been a loyal customer for 4 years, we now see he is sending games to another site. Ok, we don't like to lose our hold over him, lets direct some free stuff his way, based on things he has brought, or post made, or reviews, maybe drop some subtle emails in there. Nope, seems to have stopped buying from us, lets hit the IT problems switch, that always gets them involved. And oh, look he is back keerrcching!